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This article examines the case files of patients diagnosed withTransvestitismus[transvestism] in the Psychiatric Clinic of the Helsinki University Central Hospital in the years 1954–68. These individuals did not only want to cross-dress, but also had a strong feeling of being of a different sex from their assigned one. The scientific concept of transsexuality had begun to take form, and this knowledge reached Finland in phases. The case files of the transvestism patients show that they were highly aware of their condition and were very capable of describing it, even if they had no medical name for it. Psychiatrists were willing to engage in dialogue with the patients, and did not treat them as passive objects of study. Although some patients felt that they had been helped, many left the institution as frustrated, angered or desperate as before. They had sought medical help in the hope of having their bodies altered to correspond to their identity, but the Clinic psychiatrists insisted on seeing the problem in psychiatric terms and did not recommend surgical or hormonal treatments in most cases. This attitude would gradually change over the course of the 1970s and 1980s.

Evelyn Preer was an African American stage and film performer who achieved popularity in late 1920s. Before her untimely death in 1932, at the age of 36, Preer starred in 16 films, most of which we...

Abstract Makerspaces make a unique contribution to the partnership between academic libraries and digital humanities by providing a creative, informal space for learning skills and new knowledge, sharing materials and equipment, and exploring and experimenting through an problem-solving, inquiry-based learning approach. The concept of the makerspace as a “liminal” space, containing inherent contradictions and tensions between formal and informal learning, structure and agency, forms a basis for understanding the role the makerspace plays in shaping, and being shaped by, a digital humanities community of practice. This chapter discusses particular experiences that demonstrate some of the ways in which the Curtin Library Makerspace in Western Australia has been involved in digital humanities since it was established in 2015. It has nurtured a creative environment for informal learning through facilitating maker activities; fostered collaborations with teaching academics to support the curriculum; and supported the development of longer-term research projects. We discuss the issues particular to each of these experiences, as the Makerspace negotiated the challenge of retaining the informality of the makerspace, while at the same time recognizing the need for infrastructural support to enable it to participate as an equal partner in digital humanities research projects.

This paper is part of an ongoing debate regarding the theory raised a year ago by Dennis Duke and Matthew Goff in an attempt to re-explain the numerical values found in the Aramaic Astronomical Book (aab). According to their proposal, the composers of the aab or their sources computed the times of lunar visibility and invisibility using the phenomenon of lunar elongation. In this article, I accept Duke and Goff’s argument that their theory does not contradict the data preserved in the fragments of the scrolls of the aab. However, I demonstrate that their theory is unnecessarily complicated and that their proposal both ignores knowledge of physics available to the authors of the aab while making use of knowledge that neither the authors of the aab nor their sources obtained. Therefore, I suggest accepting Duke and Goff’s theory as a modern explanation of the astronomy of the aab, but not as a historical reconstruction.

This article examines the politics of smell at the edge of perception. In January 2014, the municipal water supply of Charleston, West Virginia was contaminated by an under-characterized chemical, crude MCHM. Even when instrumental measurements no longer detected the chemical, people continued to smell its licorice-like odor. In a space where nothing was certain, smell became the only indicator of potential harm. Officials responded by commissioning state-funded sensory testing of crude MCHM to determine its sensory threshold. Via the critical passage point of sensory science, some instances of embodied attunement were allowed to enter into the evidentiary regimes of perception, while other, similarly trained moments of attunement were excluded from the process. This, I show, produced knowledge about the spilled chemical that maintained the systems that contributed to the spill in the first place. Drawing on new materialist thought, I riff on biology and ‘transduce’ the ephemeral phenomena of smelling crude MCHM into a new medium: Rather than thinking of smell as a volatile molecular material (an odorant), I show that consideration of smell as a manipulable object that one can imagine as having tangible substance and shape offers a way to experiment with disciplinary forms. I suggest an alternate future, where sensory science acts to record sensory labor that produces facts about collective experience that cannot (easily) travel through current systems, a process that is one possible way of beginning to unravel entrenched systems of toxic harm.

Physicist Alan Sokal achieved a moment of fame by announcing that he had succeeded in publishing an article in the cultural studies journal Social Text, which was 'sprinkled with nonsense' about developments in quantum gravity physics that supposedly converge with post- modernist themes. Sokal announced his hoax in an article in the liter ary magazine Lingua Franca. This touched off an intense flurry of commentary. Many commentators praised Sokal for exposing shoddy editorial standards in the cultural studies field, while others denounced him for committing scientific fraud. With few exceptions, both Sokal's celebrants and detractors accepted his claim that he did not believe what he said in the Social Text article. Under the circumstances, it is puzzling that they took seriously what he said in Lingua Franca, and did not con sider that he was once again 'successfully pretending to be himself'. In this paper, I suggest that the Lingua Franca article also achieved a parody, and that those who took Sokal seriously were once again taken in by the voice of scientific authority.

Impersonation and then identity theft in America emerged in the legal space between a civil system with a high tolerance for market risk and losses incurred by impostors, and a later-developing criminal system preoccupied with fraud or forgery against the government. Negotiable instruments, generally paper checks, borrowed from seventeenth-century England, enabled a geographically far-flung commercial system of paper-based but impersonal exchanges at a time before widespread availability of centrally-issued currency or regulated banks. By assigning loss rather than catching criminals, the “impostor rule” made and continues to make transactions with negotiable instruments valid even if fraudulent. This large body of commercial law has stood essentially unchanged for three hundred years and has facilitated a system rife with impersonation which criminal and federal laws did not address until the late 20thcentury. English common law, American legal treatises, court cases, law review articles, and internal debates behind the Uniform Commercial Code tell the story of a legal system at the service of commerce through the unimpeded transfer of paper payments. Combining the fields of legal history and criminal justice with the approaches of emerging research in both identification and paperwork studies, this article explains the ongoing policy problems of identity theft.

For Anglican travellers in Italy, Rome had an ambiguous status. It was the seat both of high culture and of ‘superstitious’ Roman Catholic practices, including art and architecture. These extremes culminated in church buildings. This article studies the perception and reaction of English travellers in Rome towards architecture of the Roman Catholic Church and its influence on English church architecture. It will reveal the church building as an aesthetic object, in addition to possessing religious qualities, through the analysis of printed travelogues and engravings that circulated amongst the English Grand Tour travellers. By analysing the travelogue discourse — with particular attention to descriptions of specific church buildings and any intentional omissions in these descriptions — and examining the relationship between these discourses and contemporary English aesthetic theories, I will demonstrate how a certain appreciation for Roman Baroque church architecture was made acceptable and could even inspire the design of English church architecture. As will become clear, the process of travel included the separation of moral and artistic values in aesthetic appreciation. This separation made the cultural transfer between Italy and England possible in the 17th and early 18th centuries. ispartof: Architectural Histories vol:4 issue:1 pages:1-13 status: published

A partir d’une analyse du Siecle des chefs d’Yves Cohen, il s’agit de s’interroger sur un domaine de l’histoire qui n’existe pas en tant que tel : l’histoire de l’autorite. L’intention n’est pas ici d’appeler a sa naissance, mais de montrer a travers la lecture de nombreux autres ouvrages la fecondite de demarches qui s’appliquent a saisir le plus concretement possible la construction et la quotidiennete de diverses relations d’autorite dans des contextes donnes. Deux pistes de recherches paraissent particulierement interessantes : la question des materialites et celle des roles d’autorite.

Knowledge transfer across different contexts has become an increasingly prevalent feature of current science. As such, it is a relevant topic also for history and philosophy of science. This special issue presents a set of papers that study knowledge transfer in various disciplines. The contributions approach the topic from either an integrated history and philosophy of science perspective, 2) a systematic philosophical perspective, or 3) a historical perspective. This overview article is organized in three sections. The introduction provides some background and context of the topic. The second section specifies the three components of knowledge transfer, i.e., knowledge, context, and the transfer process. It motivates our take on this topic and then outlines the central ideas of each paper. The third section reflects on the kinds of methods used to study processes of knowledge transfer. The article concludes by highlighting some of the features of such processes, some of the main challenges and obstacles that those processes involve, and possible ways of dealing with them.